Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight

Last updated on: August 22, 2014 at 4:02 pm by Rebecca Frech

Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight 2014-08-22T16:02:29-05:00 Rebecca Frech

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There’s been quite the kerfuffle in the Catholic corner of the internet over whether or not one can be both a gun owner and pro-life. The discussion seems to have begun on a blog post by Mark Shea, continued through 430+ comments, and then spilled over to his Facebook page.

The argument seems to center around smart gun technology. Shea reasons that if gun owners were truly pro-life then we would support all efforts to create guns which would only fire for their owners, and then the world would be a better place. People who don’t support such legislation and research, even if they support the protection of life from conception to natural death, are not truly pro-life because they participate in a culture which accepts the possibility of death by gun shot (Mark and his readers haven’t mentioned how they aim to prevent people from being bludgeoned with a rifle butt or pistol whipped with a handgun).

It’s an interesting academic argument and the philosophical nuances are endlessly fascinating to read, but that’s the problem with it – it’s a philosophical argument. If we remove the tangential anecdotes about death threats and conspiracy theories, it is at best the reasoned argument of people who seem never to have been in a position where making such a choice is necessary. It’s easy for anyone to weigh out the moral implications of gun ownership when seated behind a computer screen.

There is a joke which “gun nuts” ruefully tell that when seconds count the police are only minutes away. The same thing could be said of the security measures Mark Shea and his readers seem to endorse. From trigger locks to fingerprint scans, these security devices will slow you down in the case of an emergency. When seconds count, help is only finding-where-the-heck-I-put-my-keys away.

After reading through all of the comments several times, I don’t get the impression that Mr Shea is particularly comfortable with the idea of guns, either on a practical or a philosophical level. While he may be a brilliant Catholic apologist, he doesn’t leave me with the feeling that he’s spent much time at the shooting range or up in a deer blind. He writes with the theoretical air of an outraged academic rather than the practical voice of experience.

I read his words and doubt that he has ever had to make the decision about whether or not to use lethal force to protect the people he loves. I say that as a person who has had to make that very decision. The sense of protection I have about my right to the unfettered access to my own firearms stems directly from personal experience.

No, Mr Shea, it’s not the government or the boogeyman from whom I needed protection. I wasn’t afraid of the Obama under my bed. It was a very real threat of harm breaking into my house and bringing a weapon with him.

A few years and six children ago, my husband and I were poor college students living in cheap housing with our baby girl. It wasn’t the greatest part of town, and could get a little dodgy, but it was what we could afford at the time.

When our daughter was born, my husband decided that it was important that she had the luxury of having her mom at home with her, so he worked two full time jobs, in addition to his studies, so that that was possible. Most nights he wasn’t home until well after 2:00 am only to leave at 7:00. This meant that the baby and I were home alone a good bit of the time.

He worried about our safety, so he made sure that I had a gun and ammunition in case I should ever need them. You see, I’m not the biggest person ever. I’m right at 5′ 3″ and was tiny. If anything happened, there was no way for me to physically fight back and have much of a chance. The gun my husband put up on our closet shelf was an equalizer, because my husband knew I would need one.

I’m not going to pretend that I was at all pleased with the “gift” he gave me. I wasn’t thrilled to have a gun in the house with a small child. It’s not that I couldn’t handle a gun. (God golly, I grew up in Texas! I can hunt and shoot with the best of ’em! Like many Texas daddies, mine made sure that his daughter could change the tire on a car and drop a deer with a single shot!) I was irrationally afraid that my six month old would scale the walls, retrieve it from the shelf, be able to pull the trigger, and hurt herself. It was a bone of contention in our house until I needed it and then I sure was glad that my husband hadn’t listened to me.

There had been a couple of break-ins in our neighborhood in the preceding weeks. Whomever it was had clearly been watching his targets because the seemed to happen within minutes of the residents’ leaving their homes in the evening. The perpetrator either forced open back doors or he had cut the screens and gone in through a window.The houses were old, and many of the doors and windows were easy to jimmy open from the outside.

One evening around close on to midnight, my husband was at work, and I was up nursing the baby. I had just begun to doze off when I heard someone try knob on the back door. When he tried to shove the door in, I ran with the baby to my bedroom. I laid her on a blanket on my closet floor, and grabbed the shotgun off of my shelf. I knew that the person trying to get in wasn’t going to give me a chance to call 911 and wait for the police to arrive. It was going to come down to just him and me.

After his third try at the door, he went to the side of the house to the only window which was both low enough to reach and in the shadows enough to be hidden. I heard the screech of blade on glass as he started to cut the screen away. I exhaled in attempt to steady my breath and calm my racing heart. All I could think was that this son of a b$&@% wasn’t getting anywhere near my baby as I hollered out, “I know you’re out there! I can hear you. Just know that I have a shotgun loaded with buckshot on this side of the window and I will shoot you!” My knees knocked together as I swallowed the lump in my throat, put both hands on the gun and racked it back.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the action of a shotgun, but it’s an unmistakable chunk-chunk kinda sound that grabs the hair on the back of your head and pulls you up short. I heard a string of expletives on the other side of the window and then the sound of footsteps as he ran away. Small as I was, he knew there was no way the knife in his hand could beat what I was holding in mine. Buckshot from less than 15 feet away isn’t something to be on the other side of.

I think back to that night every now and then. They caught that guy a few weeks later. He’d broken into more houses by then. One had had someone at home, and he beat her within an inch of her life. She’s the reason he was stopped for good, and I know that I could have easily been in her position.

You see, what Mark Shea and his readers don’t remember in their discussions is that there are real people really relying on their guns for protection. Those firearms are the tools by which we level the playing field and even tip things in our favor just a bit. If the gun I held that night had had a trigger lock, I’d have never gotten it off in time. I’d have still been searching in the diaper bag for the keys when the bad guy came through the window. If it had had some kind of smart gun technology, then we never would have been able to afford to buy it.

There’s no doubt in my mind that that gun is what kept me safe that night, and it’s a safety I want for my children to have. While we no longer live in a rough neighborhood, we do live near an area filled with coyotes, bobcats, and venomous snakes. There have been reports of transient camps in the woods a few hundred yards from our home whose residents can be dangerous, though I’ve not seen them myself to verify. The world outside of the theoretical realm can be a dangerous place to live, and the people out here in that world have a right to keep ourselves safe.

Protecting our family is why we own several guns and why they don’t have Mr Shea’s safety precautions on them. My husband and I want anyone in the house who’s capable of protecting our family to be able to protect our family.The oldest two have been taken to the range and are damn fine shots. They know the code to punch in and open the safe within seconds of a perceived threat to our family. Any of the technology Mr Shea proposes would eliminate the ability of my children to protect the siblings they often babysit. Fingerprint scans only recognize the owner and trigger locks would mean we would each need to carry a set of keys. His proposal just not realistic, and doesn’t take into account the immediacy of a situation in which these tools would be needed.

Yes, people die every year from gun violence. Yes, something needs to be done to stop needless tragedies from happening. Such deaths are not a necessary evil which must be accepted as the price of my family’s Second Amendemnt rights. They are an evil which must be combatted in the same place which all evils must be fought, in the minds and souls of human beings. It is the culture in which we live which claims these lives, guns are just one of the many tools which are used to do so. Blaming guns and gun owners is easy to do. Crying out that a lack of weapons would prevent violence is an easy battle cry, but it doesn’t fix the problem.

The problem of gun violence (and all violence) is the same problem as in euthanasia, abortion, and the death penalty. They are all points on the same spectrum of indifference. We have created a culture where other people are either convenient or not, human or not, worthy or not; and the ones in which we find no value are free for us to dispose of as we see fit. In such a world, it seems only prudent that those of us who value life would be willing to defend it, even if that makes academic type people uncomfortable.

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